Wednesday, 22 July 2015

A Setting to End All Settings

Erce
started out as one of those teenage love affairs – A setting to end
all settings, that would have room for all the fantasy elements I
loved and wanted to see in a world – When only this setting was
fleshed out, I would have a world that I could run any campaign of
any kind I'd ever want to. A perfect and inclusive vision of
everything fantasy meant to me! And also keep alive those most
precious glimpses of vital nostalgia from my emergent adolescence.
Small task indeed.

It
started out in my mind as a sort of Dragonlance + Greyhawk mix, but
with 'better done' Tolkien inspiration. And stayed like that, mostly
dormant, unpolished and wholly unfinished, for a long time.
Fast-forward a decade or so, and I began to re-visit my old notes.
Only now, my fantasy inspirations had broadened quite a bit – The
Sword & Sorcery of Conan (and Red Sonja too, I like comics),
Thieves World and Jack Vance; the terrible mediaevalism of A Song of
Ice and Fire; the hodge-podge gonzo of Mystara that it somehow pulls
of; the exotic S&S of Talislanta, The grim humour of Warhammer,
the proper post-apocalyptic worlds of Titan (of Fighting Fantasy) and
the Wilderlands of High Fantasy – and most of all: Endless hours on
Wikipedia and small websites studying the actual medieval ages,
post-Roman Europe and the glorious myths of that age.

Erce: Something like this and much more.

Though
my vision of fantasy had grown, I still liked what I had done as a
teenager with my somewhat naive 'setting-to-end-all-settings'. I felt
ready to take the bones of it and re-image it to be a setting that
could satisfy the very same demands for me today. I wanted an
evocative setting, but equally so I wanted a setting that made sense.
And on top of those (often mutually exclusive) demands, I wanted to
be able to pick up something random from the Complete Ranger's
handbook and it would just fit in well. And handle all these genres.
In short, a setting to end all settings. 2.0.

Studying
Nordic mythology gave me the perspective for it – In the past, I
had always tried to make sense of the world from a modern
perspective. A fantasy world that still had mediaevalism and
structure to satisfy modern sensibilities. But the world I had been
waiting to make was not that. It was a fantasy world with a
mediaevalism, and more importantly a fantasy, to satisfy medieval
sensibilities. In short, the door was open for a completely different
world view. I decided in advance to give one nod to modernist
thinking – It should also make sense of the implied world of D&D.
This might seem like a big ask, but I quickly found it is often
surprisingly simple when you aren't trying to make sense of it from a
modern perspective.

With
that in mind, I immediately discarded the modern elements we take for
granted – That modern physics play any sort of relevant role in the
world. That any of the social sciences are applicable. That modern
ethics are relevant. And just as importantly – The notion that the
gods and monsters our ancestors believed in were just fictions. What
if all that old stuff was 100% literal and representative of reality
as lived in medieval times? This last strain of thought stimulated my
imagination like nothing else.

A
world where D&D made sense, grown in the mould of medieval
mythology and history with copious sprayings and homages from a vast
variety of fantasy fiction, felt ready to come to life.

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About This Blog

Inspired by, but not limited to, the OSR, this is a blog about my musings on D&D in general, about my B/X-style hack of 5e called "Into the Unknown" I am looking to turn into a publication and about the Mythlands of Erce, the setting I am also hoping to publish eventually.